The 30th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
Time and the Fantastic

The 30th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts will be held March 18-22, 2009, at the Orlando Airport Marriott in Orlando, Florida. The conference begins at 3pm on Wednesday and ends at 1 am on Sunday upon the conclusion of the conference banquet. Malcolm J. Edwards and Brian Stableford write that “the metaphysics of time continues to intrigue writers inside and outside the genre” of the fantastic; thus, the focus of ICFA-30 is on the intriguing relationships between time and the fantastic. Papers are invited to explore this topic in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other related modes of the fantastic. In addition, we especially look forward to papers on the work of our honored guests:

Guest of Honor: Guy Gavriel Kay, Aurora Award-winning, Caspar Award-winning, and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-nominated author of the Fionavar Tapestry (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road), Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Last Light of the Sun

Guest of Honor: Robert Charles Wilson, Hugo Award-winning author of Axis, Spin, The Chronoliths, Darwinia, Mysterium, and A Bridge of Years

Guest Scholar: Maria Nikolajeva, author of The Aesthetic Approach to Children’s Literature (Scarecrow), The Rhetoric of Children’s Literature (Scarecrow), and From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature (Scarecrow)

As always, we also welcome proposals for individual papers and for academic sessions and panels on any aspect of the fantastic in any media. The deadline is October 31, 2008.

We encourage work from institutionally-affiliated scholars, independent scholars, international scholars who work in languages other than English, graduate students, and undergraduate students.

The Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for an Essay Not in English is open to all members of the IAFA. The IAFA Graduate Student Award is open to all graduate students presenting papers at the year’s conference. Details are available via Robin Reid, Second Vice-President (Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu). Finally, the Dell Magazines Undergraduate Science Fiction Award will also be handed out at this year’s conference.

We need your help!
We (the Book Room crew),with the fiercely sentimental editorial and lay-out help of Judy Collins McCormick,are putting together a beautiful and stylish memory book for the 30th anniversary conference next spring, and we would like to get the work done this summer if at all possible.

So . . .

We need your photos!
If you have old photos of ICFA – black and white or color – we would like copies to consider for inclusion in this publication. The older the photos, the better, but please do not neglect the recent past.

Your options:

a)You may scan them at 300dpi and e-mail them to Judy at the address below;
b) You may send physical photos to Judy (e-mail her and ask for her other address), and she will scan them and send them back. (Be sure to include your other address.)

We do, of course, need for you to identify people in the photos, since none of us look the way we used to.It would also help us if you could identify at which conference the photo was taken. And we want to credit the right people, so please let us know who took the picture.

And especially, we need your thoughts!

Yes, here’s the real pitch: We need you to write a personal reminiscence and send it to us, so that we can gather a spectrum of personal essays on what fun the conference has been, not to mention how provocative and interesting and important. We cannot promise to publish every single piece we get, but we can promise to put almost everything up on the internet on an anniversary site, including all those pictures.

Please, please, please, please, please:

E-mail a Word file to Judy at the address below;
In a cover e-mail, include your name, physical address, and phone number, as well as a mention of which conferences you have attended and whether or not you plan to attend ICFA 30. No anonymous submissions will be accepted.

Our current deadline is August 1st, but if you need a bit more time, let us know and we can probably arrange it.

If you are one of the fine people who wrote a piece for our 20th anniversary booklet, we encourage you to revise and expand that piece for the new book. If you are not one of those fine people, you are probably still a fine person, and we still want your reminiscences.

You can reach us for questions at dgh@tor.com and jarcm@insightbb.com

And if we don’t hear from you, we may email you personally — possibly several times — to “encourage” you.

Your Executive Board had its annual meeting May 30 – June 1 and we went to work right away ensuring the ongoing success of both the IAFA and its annual conference (ICFA). You will start to see the outcome of this most-recent meeting in the very near-future; but, I’m pleased to provide you with this morsel of exciting news. Donald Morse (Conference Chair) has been hard at work representing our interests with the Orlando Airport Marriott, a hotel that clearly wants to host ICFA for the foreseeable future. Donald presented this little bit of exciting news to the Executive Board that I now pass along to the membership: no room rate increases for the next three years! Yes, you are reading that correctly. Donald has managed to negotiate with the Marriott to ensure our conference guest room rate will remain at $125 for ICFA30 (2009), ICFA31 (2010), and ICFA32 (2011). This is a financial coup for the membership and ICFA’s ongoing success; so, mark this information on your calendar and book those rooms.

A special recognition needs to be made in honour of Donald Morse. He has worked tirelessly as our Conference Chair to secure the best (and most affordable) rates for ICFA’s future. He deserves a round of applause from the entire membership for securing the conference in our new Orlando home. Thank you, Donald. A pint (at least) of Guinness is owed you at ICFA30.

On behalf of the Executive Board of IAFA, I would like to announce that we have decided upon a replacement for Joe Sutliff Sanders, who has just stepped down as CYA Division Head at the end of his three-year term. The new Division Head for The Fantastic in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Art will be Amie Rose Rotruck of Hollins University.

Amie is a longstanding member of IAFA, who has been presenting papers and participating on panels in the CYA Division since its inception. She has an MA in Children’s Literature from Hollins University and is currently completing an MFA at Hollins. She also has a BS in Writing for Children and the Certificate of Children’s Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Her first book, Bronze Dragon Codex, a middle grade fantasy novel in the “Practical Guide to Dragons Adventure” series, will be out in June.

Joe will be staying on board through the end of the conference in 2009 to serve as a mentor, so we expect that the transition will go very smoothly.

The board was pleased with the response to the call for candidates for the position; four people expressed interest in the job, all of them well qualified. We thank all of the candidates and hope that all will find other ways in which to continue to contribute to the success of the conference and of the association.

Having more than ably served out his three-year term as CYA Division Head, Joe Sutliff Sanders has decided not to stand for another three-year term but instead to step down in order to devote his time to other research interests. We’re very sorry to accept Joe’s resignation, and we thank him profusely for the wonderful job that he has done over the past three years. Of course, Joe’s departure means that we are in immediate need of a new CYA Division Head.

This is an open call for volunteers interested in being considered for the position.

The Division Head is the person who sends out paper calls for his/her Division, collects and accepts paper proposals, creates paper sessions, helps to create panels, and passes the work s/he’s done on to the 1st Vice President for scheduling. This Division is responsible for all aspects of fantasy, science fiction, and horror in literature and art that is marketed primarily to children and young adults. In past conferences, the CYA Division has sponsored papers on the work of J.K. Rowling, Alan Garner, Edward Eager, Lewis Carroll, Lois Lowry, C. S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, Philip Pullman, Robin McKinley, David Almond, Megan Whalen Turner, Maurice Sendak, and many more authors and illlustrators.

Qualifications include current membership with IAFA (at least a couple of years of experience with the organization and conference attendance so you have some understanding of how things work at the conference), comfort with computers, easy and dependable internet access, organizational skills, the ability to work as part of a group working together on the ‘big picture,’ a willingness to work through the transition with Joe beginning immediately, the ability to attend March conferences while you hold the position and to attend the Division Heads’ meeting run by the 1st VP at the conference, plus, of course, the time required to do the work involved. The most successful division heads also make a point throughout the year of watching for new ways to advertise their divisions and for emerging scholars to approach with calls for papers. Division Heads hold office for a term of 3 years (with a probationary first year) with the possibility of renewal for a second 3-year term.

If you’re interested in taking on the work of CYA Division Head, please contact both Chrissie Mains, 1st Vice President (cemains AT shaw.ca) and Joe Sutliff Sanders, outgoing CYA Division Head (dr.joess AT gmail.com) with a brief statement about your interest in and qualifications for the job. The IAFA board of directors will consider all applications for the position.

Now that ICFA-29 is over and everyone is slowly returning to their base of operations, I thought I’d provide some commentary and/or observations on the entire experience. I begin with a query: how was it? Really! How was it? For those of you who noticed, I didn’t actually make it this year in spite of my best intentions. You see, the week before ICFA I became a father to Declan Kyle John Atticus Murphy. I couldn’t then leave my newborn son and my wife (who was supposed to join me this year) to fend for themselves while I was off in Florida; so, I had to cancel my trip (and the Board has been wonderfully supportive of this decision … my heartfelt thanks!!!). I’ve since heard from a few people that it was a wonderful conference and that it went off without a hitch, but I’d like to hear from you. So, if you wanted to send me your thoughts, commentary, stories, etc. I can then post them to the blog on your behalf. If you’re interested, please e-mail me at GrahamMurphy AT trentu.ca and I’ll start posting content (please be advised that I might edit according to length).

In the meantime, we’ve already started work on ICFA-30, our anniversary conference. So, keep checking www.iafa.org for updates and book early as this one promises to be the conference of all conferences.

Hello IAFAers,
A notice went out on iafa-l last week but just a reminder: the ICFA Universal excursion scheduled for Sunday has officially sold out. The bus is full and hiding one more in the bathroom at the back isn’t a viable option. Thanks to you all for coming out. We’ll look forward to seeing you at ICFA and on the bus on Sunday.

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